Rwenzori Center for Research and Advocacy

RCRA forecasts a healthier community with broken ties and hardships for access to knowledge based information for accelerated development.

RCRA MISSION:

To empower communities for economic development, improved health, water, climate resilience by accelerating access to information to pursue social change through communication technologies.

‘’Fostering innovations saving lives of women and children’’

Characteristics of the founders

RCRA was well founded by highly experienced social workers, statisticians, researchers, communication technology experts and health professionals.

Prior to establishing RCRA, the principal founder (Jostas Mwebembezi) a certified Statistician, conducted research in 2009 to find out the drivers of community burden to preventable community development challenges which are but not limited to healthcare, economic empowerment and child wellbeing. Results showed that majority our people lacked access to development information and education for behavioral change.

Due to high preventable maternal deaths, disease breakouts, increasing population growth rate with stationary low family incomes all are caused by information shortages in the community yet there exists abundance of development information elsewhere in the country. When people have limited access to information causes them to fall in the dilemma of preventable maternal deaths and continued vulnerability to HIV/AIDS, Malaria, TB, Measles, Guinea warm, Cholera, Ebola, among others.
It is our belief that… If RCRA and community resource persons strengthen households[1] access to quality and affordable health products and service; and if RCRA and community resource persons strengthen the Private sector and informal community structures to increase the quality of services available, then households will increase their access to and utilization of the specific range of services they need, because the linkages and referral between quality affordable core health products and services will be improved.

And it is our belief that…

If

Health centres have computers and semi-literate staff
Health workers can record patients data and make patient/client follow up on hard copy with the village health workers
Government tracking and other tools are installed in the community health centres
Youth of adolescent age are semi-literate
Households have and listen to radio communications
Then

Satellite dedicated Internet once supplied to the health centres, will strengthen human resources at health centres with evidence and track service delivery and service consumers’ behavior in the community, thereby solving the problem of limited capacity to track pregnant women not attending antenatal care. This will reduce the maternal mortality Rate (MMR). Moreover, establishing a dashboard to track all under-5 children immunizations will enable health workers to track children not immunization and not receiving recommended services. This will help reduce infant mortality rates (IMR).Other services to be strengthened will include: family planning, adolescent health information services para-natal care, malaria, Tuberculosis, HIV prevention and treatment, breast cancer screening, and other non-communicable diseases.
Adolescent reproductive health curriculum kiosks once established will improve youth’s knowledge on adolescent health and further create jobs for the unemployed vulnerable youth.
Health communications radio station, once established, will accelerate strategic health communications for healthy communities.
RCRA believes that, when people lack access to information, they are unlikely to move out of the viscous circle of poverty. RCRA was therefore established to assist the state in closing the information access gap in the community to enable people live self-sustainable livelihoods, know where to find response services (such as immunization, antenatal care, post natal care, HIV/AIDS testing & treatment, elimination of mother to child transmission of HIV, Reproductive Health, market inclusion, know where to report incidences of violation or child sexual abuses, etc). www.rcra-uganda.org